“Good Lord, man!” he said, after it, “am I the man to judge another? I’ve made nothing of life.”
“You have done no creature a wrong,” Baird said. “And you have helped some to happiness.”
“Well,” admitted Big Tom, “perhaps that’s true. But I’ve been a lumbering failure myself. I’ve just judgment enough now to know that there’s nothing a man can say about a thing like this—nothing—and just sense enough not to try to say it.”
“If you go back to North Carolina,” asked Baird, “may I come to see you—and to see her? She need never know.”
“I shouldn’t want her to know,” Tom answered, “but you may come. We shall go back, and I intend to let those two young ones set up a Garden of Eden of their own. It will be a good thing to look on at. Yes, you may come.”
“That is mercifulness,” said Baird, and this time when he put out his hand he did not withdraw it, and Tom gave it a strong, sober clasp which expressed more than one emotion.
When Tom returned to the little house near Dupont Circle, Uncle Matt wore a rigidly repressed air as he opened the door, and Miss Burford stood in the hall as if waiting for something. Her ringlets were shaken by a light tremor.
“We have either won the claim this afternoon or lost it,” Tom said to himself, having glanced at both of them and exchanged the usual greeting.